August 2010 World's Leading Researchers in Artificial Intelligence to Speak at NUI Galway

NUI Galway will host two of the world's leading researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive Science at the Annual Irish Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference (AICS) which will take place from today (Monday, 30 August) to Wednesday, 1 September. Professor Scott Kelso, USA and Professor Ulrik Brandes, Germany, are both very distinguished in the field. Artificial Intelligence is concerned with producing machines that perform tasks requiring intelligent behaviour. Cognitive Science is the study of mind and human intelligence, including computational models of human cognition. Josephine Griffith, Lecturer in Information Technology at NUI Galway, says: "Although Artificial Intelligence might sound abstract and futuristic, it has a surprisingly large number of practical real-world applications. When you search with Google, get a book recommendation on Amazon, play against the computer in an Xbox game or use speech recognition on a modern mobile phone, you are using Artificial Intelligence". Professor Scott Kelso, an Irish-born neuroscientist, encouraged a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex human behaviour. Prior to his work, many scientists thought that coordinated behaviour, such as picking up an object, was controlled by a central program that instructed components, like limbs, to behave together. Professor Kelso contended that the behaviour was self-organised and that the coordinated pattern emerged as the result of interactions among a vast number of connected elements. Professor Ulrik Brandes is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is an expert on theory and analysis of social networks, which are the graphs of relationships between people who use services such as Facebook and Twitter. During his address he will question the effectiveness of current practice in many fields, including viral marketing and research assessment in terms of detecting the most influential of social economic and information networks. This long-running AICS conference series, established in 1988, allows participation from researchers across the island of Ireland and beyond. This year will feature 22 presentations from researchers from Irish Universities and Institutes of Technology, as well as a Student Symposium. The topics are diverse and will include: AI in computer games strategies, for robotic learning, clientism in Irish politics, AI for tracking human emotions, automatic recognition of sentiments expressed online and in reviews, understanding how people learn second languages, and interpretation of brain scans. Dr Michael Madden, Lecturer and Programme Director of the BSc in Information Technology at NUI Galway, also comments: "NUI Galway has a long-standing involvement and distinct expertise in both AI and Cognitive Science research. AI is an important branch of Computer Science, with Irish AI researchers publishing frequently in international AI conferences and journals. There have also been some notable successes in AI commercialisation in Ireland, including AI-related patents filed in several universities and some spin-out companies". -Ends-